Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Notes
1 The Yellowstone wolf population has been labelled 'experimental' by the US Fish and
Wildlife Service. This designation allows for the removal or 'control' (i.e.
extermination) of 'problem' animals (i.e. those that transgress park and/or human
boundaries).
2Red wo f
(Canis rufus)
reintroduction into the Alligator National Wildlife Refuge of
coastal North Carolina preceded the Yellowstone release by several years.
3 Philo (1995) provides an excellent example of the 'in/out' of placeness of animals in an
urban context.
4 I am indebted to Chris Philo for this term.
5 Entrikin (1991) provides a thoughtful exposition on the role of narrative to the
meaning of place.
6 Gray wolves have maintained 'natural' populations in the northern tier of states, most
notably Minnesota and Michigan. They regularly cross into the US from Canada via
north—south-running mountain chains in the American west (e.g. Cascades, Rockies,
Bitterroots), and there is recent sign of their presence in Maine.
7 Brutal and unequal treatment of Native American populations does, of course, still
exist in the US, yet in more insidious and 'invisible' ways (Deloria 1985; Matthiessen
1991).
8These 'visitors from the woods' also included cougars, subjects of a hatred even more
intense than that towards the wolves. In the words of an early explorer, cougars were
'the slyest, strongest, bloodiest ranger in the woods' (Murray 1869:60). Their
extermination too was inevitable.
9
See Mau (1944:238) for an apt description of an early New York 'wolf drive.'
10
The present-day counties of Hamilton, Herkimer, Fulton, Montgomery, Lewis and
Oneida make up this interior region.
11
Especially represented here were animals of economic significance (e.g. beaver, marten
and mink) and 'predators' such as cougar, lynx and bear.
12
By this time, rail and, especially, steamboat regularly shuttled between New York City
and Lake Champlain.
13
This term was used by early settlers and explorers also to describe local Native
American populations (e.g. Byron-Curtiss 1976).
14
The Adirondack Museum's 1961 publication,
Journal of a Hunting Excursion to Louis
Lake—1851,
provides an excellent account of an urban hunting expedition to the
Adirondacks. It well exemplifies the carnage of which these unexperienced 'sportsmen'
were capable.
References
Adirondack Museum. (1961)
Journal of a Hunting Excursion to Louis Lake—1851,
Blue
Mountain Lake, NY: Adirondack Museum Publications.
Anderson, K. (1995) 'Culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo: at the frontiers of “human”
geography',
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
20:275-294.
Anderson, K. (1998) 'Animals, science and spectacle in the city', in J.Wolch and J.Emel (eds)
Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature—Culture Borderlands,
New
York: Verso.
